If Senator Barack Obama is ever thinking of running for president— or changing careers to rock star—he got excellent practice in Nairobi on Friday.Thousands of people lined the streets, waiting hours in the intense sunshine just for a glimpse of him. Local newspapers overflowed with breathless coverage, including the headline, “Village beats the drums for returning son.” Everywhere he went he had to part seas of shutter-snapping journalists and mobs of ecstatic fans. A riot nearly broke out when he slipped past his bodyguards at a downtown event and simply smiled at the crowd. “Obaaammmaaaa!” the people yelled.Obama, a freshman Democratic senator from Illinois, was in Kenya’s capital on Friday as part of a tightly scripted four-country tour in Africa to raise awareness for AIDS and to reconnect with his roots. His father was a goat herder-turned-economist from western Kenya and, though Obama was never close to him or spent much time in Kenya, many Kenyans claim him as one of their own.“He’s our lion,” said George Mimba, a computer consultant, after shaking Obama’s hand. “He will help us,” said Bob Osano, a marketing agent stuck behind a metal barricade. Schools in western Kenya have been renamed for Obama. Unofficially, so has a popular brand of beer.All week, people near Nyangoma-Kogelo, the village where Obama’s father grew up, were scrambling to prepare a welcome fit for royalty, fixing roads, practicing skits and ironing their Obama T-shirts. On Saturday, Obama visits the village and sit in a tin-roof house with his grandmother, who speaks no English and will be waiting for the rising Democratic statesman with an egg, apparently a grandmother-grandson tradition in these parts. He also plans to take an HIV test in public to help promote awareness of the virus.Obama seems to be many things to people here: a role model; a black man succeeding in a white man’s world (he is the only African-American in the United States Senate); a friend in a high place; and the embodiment of American opportunity and multiculturalism (his mother is white and from Kansas). In Kenya, people who are half-white and half-black are called “point fives.”Obama, who sits on the Senate subcommittee for African affairs, was asked the question everybody wanted to ask: Does he harbour presidential ambitions? If so, will he run for president in 2008? “I don’t know what to do with these two questions,” Obama said.“The day after my election to the US Senate, somebody asked me, am I running in 2008. I said at that time: ‘no.’ “And nothing so far,” he said, slightly stressing the last two words, “ has changed my mind.”-JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
